Two years af­ter tip­toe­ing in­to the pro­tein degra­da­tion space with a dis­cov­ery pact cen­tered on neu­rode­gen­er­a­tion, Ab­b­Vie is wad­ing deep­er to ex­plore the more com­mon ap­pli­ca­tions in can­cer and im­muno­log­i­cal dis­eases.

The phar­ma gi­ant is hand­ing Fron­tier Med­i­cines $55 mil­lion up­front to get things start­ed while promis­ing to re­im­burse its pre­clin­i­cal R&D costs. In ad­di­tion to drug can­di­dates that tar­get E3 lig­as­es — a key mem­ber of the body’s nat­ur­al degra­da­tion sys­tem — Fron­tier will al­so be scout­ing small mol­e­cule binders to tar­gets.

At the core of Fron­tier’s plat­form, CEO Chris Var­ma pre­vi­ous­ly ex­plained to End­points News, is some­thing they call chemo­pro­teomics. By ex­am­in­ing tem­po­rary pock­ets in pro­teins, they find new ways to bind tar­gets usu­al­ly con­sid­ered un­drug­gable.

The plat­form has opened up a vast ar­ray of tar­gets, he sug­gest­ed in a state­ment. Team­ing up with Ab­b­Vie will cre­ate a shared pipeline sep­a­rate from its in­ter­nal one, and the big­ger part­ner will be ful­ly re­spon­si­ble for clin­i­cal de­vel­op­ment once a pro­gram cross­es the thresh­old.

Fron­tier is based out of South San Fran­cis­co, just min­utes from the R&D hub Ab­b­Vie has blue­print­ed in Oys­ter Point. In ad­di­tion to the up­front, it’s el­i­gi­ble for more than $1 bil­lion in mile­stones, $45 mil­lion of which are lined up for the com­ing year.

Tar­get­ed pro­tein degra­da­tion and chemo­pro­teomics are among the key strate­gic fo­cus ar­eas at Ab­b­Vie, said Jose-Car­los Gutiér­rez-Ramos, VP of dis­cov­ery.

It’s not alone. Sanofi, Roche, Bay­er, Gilead and Ver­tex have all inked their own pro­tein degra­da­tion pacts, high­light­ing a slate of pi­o­neer­ing as well as up-and-com­ing play­ers. While can­cer tar­gets loom large, im­munol­o­gy is al­so emerg­ing as a key field of in­ter­est.

Back in 2018 the com­pa­ny tapped Mis­sion Ther­a­peu­tics to un­earth some deu­biq­ui­ty­lat­ing en­zymes to tack­le Alzheimer’s and Parkin­son’s dis­ease. One year ago it chose a pan­el that’s go­ing in­to fur­ther char­ac­ter­i­za­tion and screen­ing.

President Joe Biden made clear in his “finish the job” State of the Union address last night that one of those jobs to be finished is insulin prices.

Biden’s push again to tackle insulin prices, after Republicans rebuffed the idea last summer and just after Biden won Medicare drug price negotiations/caps via the Inflation Reduction Act, shows how heavily he’s leaning into this work.

Six weeks into his new role at the helm of Teva Pharmaceutical, Richard Francis said it’s time to “get back to growth,” starting with a good look at the company’s priorities.

The chief executive has kicked off a strategic review, he announced during Teva’s quarterly call, which will continue over the next several months and produce results sometime in the middle of 2023. That means some pipeline cuts may be in store, he told Endpoints News, while declining to offer much more detail.

FDA Commissioner Rob Califf joined the heads of the CDC and NIH in the hot seat today before a key House subcommittee, explaining that there needs to be a much faster, more coordinated way to oversee vaccine safety, and that foreign biopharma inspections, halted for years due to the pandemic, are slowly ramping up again.

Califf, who stressed to the House Energy and Commerce’s Subcommittee on Health that the CDC also needs better data, made clear that the FDA’s ability to monitor the safety of vaccines “would also benefit greatly by a coordinated federal public health data reporting authority.”